NOTE – Although I’ve tried it out only on nVidia hardware, this solution should work well on ATI chipsets as well

A little background though – from what I’ve found after a lot of digging on the Internet, two things are pretty clear. Firstly, the video tearing seems worse in Ubuntu Oneiric than in Natty. Secondly, the video tearing doesn’t seem to be tied to the driver itself (I can confirm from personal experience that I’ve had tearing on both the open source and the proprietary drivers – the pattern of tearing seems to vary though :p). After looking through several bugs filed on Launchpad, I’ve found that the problem seems to be related to Compiz. This fact can be verified by switching to a non-compositing desktop like Xfce or LXDE, which removes tearing altogether. But if you’re hell-bent on removing video tearing in Unity, today’s the day you get closer to that goal.

Mr. Daniel van Vugt seems to be working on a solution to video tearing that should help us all in the long run, now that major desktop environments have made compositing mandatory (GNOME 3 and Unity). Until his work is committed to the Compiz Core package, he has put it up on Launchpad PPAs. It seems pretty effective, and is definitely worth a try.

But, there are a couple of things to be considered before we begin.

First off, and this is highly important – Do NOT switch between the open source and the proprietary drivers once you’ve installed the PPA. It will render your system unbootable. Trust me, I know from bitter experience.